Today we’re happy to announce an updated version of our Webmaster Quality Guidelines. Both our basic quality guidelines and many of our more specific articles (like those on links schemes or hidden text) have been reorganized and expanded to provide you with more information about how to create quality websites for both users and Google.

The main message of our quality guidelines hasn’t changed: Focus on the user. However, we’ve added more guidance and examples of behavior that you should avoid in order to keep your site in good standing with Google’s search results. We’ve also added a set of quality and technical guidelines for rich snippets, as structured markup is becoming increasingly popular.

We hope these updated guidelines will give you a better understanding of how to create and maintain Google-friendly websites.